Don't Just Suck My Cock

"What makes good erotica?" my best friend AV Flox inquired of me a few evenings ago, during a sort of mini-interview for her latest BlogHer article on whether or not gender determines how good your erotica is.

It took me only a drag from my Marlboro Red to reply to her query. "Well, obviously being a good writer, and using language well," I said. "Also being able to fully explore all elements of fantasy. Also I think that old fiction workshop saying of 'write what you know' is doubly true for erotica. Write what you know, or, write what you fantasize about, and I think if you do, it becomes a much better piece, more involved, more engaging."

But I couldn't help but continue to wonder, long after our mini-interview was concluded, what does make good erotica? Simply being a good writer does not always mean that one's turns of literary phrases can successfully produce a tumescent cock or a wet cunt. In fact, upon reflection, I realized that quite a lot of the really amazingly hot erotica I had read throughout my life was written by non-writers.

My introduction to erotica came at what for some would be an embarrassingly early age, but I love that I discovered it at age eleven, while fetching my mother's painkillers from one of her night tables during one of her migraines. Thankfully, my mother was a discriminating woman of letters, so the anthologies of erotica that I found were amazing, and I spirited them away to read in our attic while my mother was sleeping on a chaise lounge in our parlor. They were fabulous, these explorations of desire and pleasure, by women named Erica Jong and even Grace Zabriskie, full of lush descriptions and...well, far more erotic to me than the V.C. Andrews sex scenes with which I had heretofore been obsessed! And the pieces I liked the best, the pieces that turned me on the most, even though I was only eleven and wouldn't experience anything close to what I was reading for, oh, at least another year, all seemed to share one thing.

They pushed the envelope.

They weren't stories that were just about staccato breathing, baritone moaning, and cocks in cunts. They were stories that were about sex, yes, but bizarre, almost other-worldly, definitely full of inventive fantasy. They, as all good literature should, erotic or not, told stories, and told them well, pulling their readers out of themselves and into the minds, into the flesh, of their characters. I remembered them well when, several years and many occasions of group sex in a Swiss boarding school later, I picked up my first anthology of gay erotica, in the Rizzoli on 57th Street. Curious to see if gay erotica was any different from the straight erotica I had read years before, I bought it, read it, and was astonishingly disappointed nearly from the very beginning. Surely, I thought to myself, these writers can formulate sex stories that involve more than cocks in mouths and asses in filthy roadside rest stop men's rooms? (Although that story, in hindsight, actually was kind of hot, now that I think about it more.) None of the stories seemed to pull me in, to communicate their fantasies in a way that would sufficiently engage me enough so that I wanted to be in their characters' flesh.

Until "Blue Light."

About halfway through the anthology, I stumbled across Aaron Travis' "Blue Light": a paranormal, nearly epic erotic tale of submission, domination, and sexual witchcraft. I was breathless nearly the entire way through it, as the story built, as the psychologies of its main characters became more clearly defined and pulled me into them, and, of course, as the epic evening of sex unfolded in a Texas attic between two muscular doms, as one forces the other to submit to him with a variety of...arguably quite disturbing tricks. It was, and is, precisely what I think good erotica is, i.e., a story that not only makes its readers turned on, want to masturbate, and come, but, through its evocative use of language and seductive creation of fantasy, of pushing that fantasy to its very limits, that's what good erotica is.

In a recent piece published on her personal blog, Laura Roberts, founder of (and my editor at) Black Heart Magazine, a web magazine of "the dirtiest minds in literature," pondered the question, "Is erotica dead?" Her piece concludes with the following insightful, and, I think, rather true, thoughts.

We need more than pumping and thrusting. We desire more than mere male-takes-female fucks. We are interested as much in our lovers' brains as we are in their genitalia, and making their naughty bits tingle with frenzied longing. We want to caress our lover's brains as much as their parts. It is at least as much the anticipation that turns us on as the act itself. And the waiting is the most delicious part of any game. Don't you think?

And I think that pretty much fills out and completes my definition of what makes good erotica.

It's not just about sucking cock. It's about fucking the mind, as well.

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A Note From The Plus One: For those of you interested in Aaron Travis' "Blue Light," I highly recommend looking it up. It is currently available in The Best of Best American Erotica 2008: 15th Anniversary Edition (ed. Susie Bright) and Homosex: Sixty Years of Gay Erotica (by Simon Sheppard). I promise you will not be disappointed.